Sorting Out the Lies
by Nine1
Summary: A longfic one-shot Ken POV that contains Kensuke, Kenryo, and Osaken. A collection of memories thrown together in random order, creating a beautiful tangled web of a life. This fic is balancing on the fine line between PG-13 and R. Be warned.


A/N: I felt like writing a longfic full of memories making up a life, all placed in random order, and so I finally have. This is all from Ken's POV, and it contains Kensuke and Kenryo (Ken x Ryo), and be warned that there are parts that are Osaken (Osamu x Ken). Remember, this fic is not in order. It was intended to be mixed up like that. Think Pulp Fiction. Anyways, this story is a one-shot, and is somewhat long, but I am very happy with it and I've impressed myself by actually having the patience to finish something like this. This fic has a lot of hidden meanings and symbolism and you sort of have to read between the lines towards the end, but I trust that you all are smart enough to "get it." Without further ado, my newest project: Sorting Out the Lies.

Warnings: Contains dark material that you may not wish to read about. Take the rating seriously. I will not name everything that appears in this fic that you should be warned about, but just know that I've given you a warning.

Sorting Out the Lies

Written by: Nine

The sink is running again. I stop and stare at the bathroom door. It's closed, but I can still hear the water running in the sink on the other side of the door. 

It was an accident the first time I heard it. I had gotten out of bed in the middle of the night, needing desperately to go to the bathroom. The door had been locked, and when I paid close attention, I could hear the sound of water running. The sound stopped, and I waited outside the door for it to open. It never did, so I went back to my room. After my door closed, I waited a few seconds and then heard the bathroom door opening and closing. Footsteps padded down the hallway and another door opened and closed. I opened my own and ran to the bathroom, twitching with my need to relieve myself. Afterwards, I took a peek at the sink and saw the faucet was still dripping. It hadn't been shut all the way. I moved my hand to close it and I noticed the hot water was the only one on. 

That was a few nights ago. Ever since, I've gotten up every night at the same time, and every single time, the faucet has been running. I stare at the bathroom door, daring it to open and reveal the person inside, though I know who it is already. As usual, it remains closed, and as usual, as soon as I step back into my own bedroom and shut my door, I hear the bathroom door opening and closing, footsteps rushing down the hall and slipping into the bedroom two doors down from my own.

I don't know why she is doing this. I don't know why she acts as if nothing ever happened when I see her in the kitchen the next morning. I don't even think she's fully aware of what she does at night when the sun is still up and it's still showering daylight on our apartment.

I guess she doesn't want her day life to ever overlap her night life, or her night life to ever cross into her day life. Then again, she isn't the only person I know who feels that way.

~ ~ ~ ~  


He used to infuriate me. I used to hate him for the way he made me so confused. I wouldn't know whether I wanted to kiss him or kill him; my mind changed from one to the other in a split second and I wouldn't know what to do. I never could quite figure him out. All of the others, they were easy to figure out. The blonde one was the voice of hope, the small brunette was the optimist that helped keep morale high, the girl with the purple hair and glasses broke you out of a bad mood, either by making you laugh or pissing you off, and the littlest one, the boy with those shockingly green eyes, kept everyone thinking logically so they could solve problems easier. 

That boy, with the goggles and the spiked red hair and the irritating, contagious grin...I didn't know what he was supposed to represent. I would say he bounced around, quite literally, from one job to another, helping all of the other four with their respective jobs when he could, but at the same time, he wasn't like any one of them. It would be so easy to say his role was the one of the leader, but I'm sorry to say I seriously don't think the others paid enough attention to him to actually follow him much. He certainly never got the credit or the attention he deserved. That is one thing I understand and like about him. He's misunderstood, and he's a whole different person from what everyone mistakenly sees him as.

No, he isn't quite the leader he pretends to be. He has leadership qualities, but he lacks the respect one usually earns as the leader of a group. I'm not sure his group even wants him to be the leader. I've seen them choose to listen to the blonde boy over him all too often. 

With that much of a lack of respect, I'm sure he isn't oblivious to it.

Sometimes I think that grin is all for show. Sometimes I think maybe he doesn't think he's the greatest person to walk the earth after all. Sometimes I think maybe his old goggles aren't the only thing that has cracked.

~ ~ ~ ~

He's holding it up in the air like a huge banner with his heart's wishes written across in blood. It is the first thing I notice when I stick my head out of my window. My parents are knocking their fists on my door, demanding to know what all of that noise is. The lights go on in my next door neighbor's house. I don't notice either of these things happening. All of my attention has long been focused on him.

"What are you doing?" I call down to him from my window, my face betraying a smile. 

"What does it look like?" he calls back up to me, lowering the boombox slightly. 

I vaguely recognize the song playing as an old 80's love song, but I do not recall the name.

"Ken, honey, open your door!" I hear my mother call through my locked bedroom door.

I ignore her, leaning down on my windowsill to smile at the boy standing on the ground under my window. 

"They're going to call the cops," I call down to him.

"Do you really think I care?" he calls back up to me, saying each word slowly, that crazy grin getting wider with each word.

I laugh to myself, the sound lost beneath the music playing full blast on his boombox CD player. 

"You stole this from that John Cussack movie," I accuse him.

"Maybe," he agrees, eyes squinting as the lights from my apartment's lower floor comes on. 

I watch as he turns his boombox off, and the sudden lack of noise is even more deafening to my ears than the music had been. He turns and begins running off across the street to his own apartment. 

I slide down onto the floor of my bedroom as my mother yells at the door once again, and my only thought is that I hope he doesn't get caught by the police.

~ ~ ~ ~

It comforts me when we are like this. It's skin against skin, but not too much. It's his heart laid open for me to see, complete with his faults and his failures. It's me cracking my own heart open a tiny bit so he can peek into it and catch a glimpse of real emotions running through my veins. I never let him in more than I mean to. I never mean to let him in more than I think my mind can take. The moments when I lose control and bare more than I was supposed to are rare. He doesn't mind it too much. He is glad to receive what little I already give him. He is more patient with me than anyone I've ever known. He is also the least patient person I've ever known in my entire life.

~ ~ ~ ~

I hadn't noticed it before. There were so many of them I hardly even glanced at a few of them. Hikari had insisted that I look them over. She wanted each of the Digidestined, and somehow she includes me in that group, to pick one or two pictures from the batch to have for themselves. I was going to look for two in which I came out horribly to take home and burn. I was usually quite photogenic, since I had pretty much had to be with reporters following me around and snapping my picture when I least expected it, but every so often a few pictures would come out with me looking just plain bad. As I looked over many which did not include me, which I had expected, that certain picture caught my eye. I could not look away.

I felt a slow burning sensation crawl around inside of my stomach. It rose up in my chest and threatened to turn me inside out. I snatched the picture and shoved it into a pocket. I stood and walked to where she had paused to gaze at the fountain in the center of that area of the park. I shoved the rest of the pictures into her hands and took off without another word. She called after me asking me which picture I had taken. I was fairly sure she would notice which one I'd picked after looking them over, so I didn't bother to answer her.

Once I was safely home and in my room, I searched through my drawers frantically until I found what I'd been looking for. It shined silver in the light falling through my window blinds and I quickly flicked it open and held it under the picture.

I knew what the burning sensation was. It was pure, unadulterated jealousy in its most rich and raw form. It ate at my heart like nothing I had ever felt before. In the picture, Hikari rested her head on Daisuke's shoulder, smiling peacefully at the camera. Daisuke rested an arm around Hikari's shoulders and gave the camera his usual victory sign with a satisfied smirk and one eye winked shut. He was blushing. So was she. 

Soon the burning inside of me manifested itself in my hand, climbing up one side of the photo slowly, devouring it inch by inch. I shut the lighter and put it back in my drawer, holding a corner of the burning photo with two fingertips. I walked over to my wastebasket and dropped it in.

I had never felt such a delicious feeling of revenge up until that gratifying moment.

It was only late that night, after I had regained my senses, that I realized I should have simply cut her out of the photo and only burned her part of the picture. There went a perfectly good captured image of my precious Daisuke, gone up in flames. The fate of his picture somehow suited him.

~ ~ ~ ~

I can hear them. They are all gathered in my living room. They are celebrating, and I don't think I've ever heard a more grating sound than the sound of their loud, merry laughter. 

I sit hunched on top of the toilet, feet tucked so that they are curved against the floor and the tops of my feet are pressing down on the cool tile, my heels and the bottoms of my feet facing upwards. It is an awkward position, but the slight build of pain it is granting me takes my mind off of the noise coming from outside of the bathroom and somehow keeps me focused on the words in front of me. 

The book is neither boring nor fascinating to me, and I have been on the same page for a long time now, but I would much rather be locked in here, reading a book in my bathroom because there is no other place for me to hide from them, than be out there.

Someone comes to the bathroom door and knocks. 

"It's occupied," I call, keeping my eyes trained on the small black letters and words.

"Ken, honey, would you please come out of there? You've been in there for an hour."

"I don't want to," I respond calmly. Inside my mind, I am screaming.

My fingers clench the page I had been holding delicately between two fingertips at the corner, ready to turn the page as soon as I was done with the current sentence.

"But Ken, it's your birthday party," she calls, her voice sounding more begging than reprimanding.

"Doesn't feel like it," I say, and this time I follow it with a curse because I can hear the slight tremor in my own voice.

I suddenly and violently don't want to be thirteen years old.

~ ~ ~ ~

It is a strange feeling. It is a mixture of both happiness and sorrow. It is both relief and regret. It both calms me and terrifies me. I have never had a gun pointed at my head before now. That must be why this feeling is so alien to me. I have never felt it before. I have never had a reason to feel it before.

The ring of silver metal aims directly at my forehead. 

I realize I have stopped breathing. I wonder if I have forgotten how, and if I have, will I pass out before he shoots me? And if I do, will I die while unconscious? Then, it would be nothing more to me than if I were sleeping. I have always thought the nicest way to die is in your sleep.

~ ~ ~ ~

There was a cracked pattern on my ceiling that I looked at oftentimes when I was a child. It was like a stray cloud in a child's clear sky, constantly changing shape and usually taking the form of an animal or an object. The crack in my ceiling was the subject of my gaze that night as well. Everything was falling apart all around me, and the pain inside of me, just underneath my skin, was making my body writhe and my eyes water, but I willed myself not to make a sound, thinking that this would help it end sooner. Everything was surreal, nothing was familiar. The crack in the ceiling was the only thing I recognized, and so I could not look away, lest I get lost again. 

I was confused because I had never lost touch with reality like that before. Before, I had always laid there quietly and let it happen like a good little boy. He said it was supposed to hurt less after it happened more often, but he had been coming to me for several weeks before that night and I could not tell the difference in the level of pain I felt that night from what I felt the very first night. 

The crack was becoming blurry. He laughed to himself, a wicked, cruel sound, somewhere above me, in the place I wasn't letting myself look because it wasn't in the line of vision between my eyes and that place on the ceiling. Then, he pressed his face down against the side of mine and I couldn't see the crack through the large amount of dark hair covering my face, and that didn't matter because my vision was now completely hazed over and if I could see through his hair, I wouldn't be able to see a thing anyways.

He muttered about how obedient I was and smoothed my sweaty hair back from my face with a pale, long-fingered hand. His hair moved out of my vision and I concentrated on the crack again. My vision wasn't hazy anymore, and was actually quite clear, but I could feel wetness on my cheeks and I suddenly understood what the blurring had been about before. He told me to look at him instead of the ceiling, throwing a curse word into his sentence to make it easier to attract my attention. I chanced a glance at him, sure that the crack would not mind a second or two without my gaze upon it. He was grinning that wicked grin and his indigo-blue eyes shimmered in the moonlight with what I guessed must be cruel victory. He was pulling his pajama bottoms back up onto his hips.

"I won't be coming to your room tomorrow night. I'm going to sleep over at a friend's house."

"Are you going to fuck him?" I asked quietly, staring at the crack again.

He laughed and ruffled my hair, and seconds later I heard my door open and then close again. 

I became vaguely aware of a sudden need to shower, or at least wipe the sweat off of my body somehow. Despite my craving for a wash, I continued to lie there, my numb state beginning to slowly wear off to allow my body to fall asleep. 

Right before I closed my eyes, I thought I saw a strange animal I had never seen before form on my ceiling, bearing a close resemblance to a kind of insect I couldn't care to name in the split second before my body shut down for sleep.

~ ~ ~ ~

He was visiting me again. It was always weird when he came over to my apartment. I much preferred to go over to his. I'm not sure if he knew that. I don't think he even knew how uncomfortable I felt every time I opened the door to let him into my apartment. Then again, my calm mask was always in place by then, and I'd have been surprised if he had noticed any disturbance in my mood.

My mother came into the living room where we sat on the couch, watching the television. A show that he enjoyed watching was on the screen. It was a show about a veterinary clinic. He always told me he loved animals. I think he wanted to be a vet when he grew up. 

As the veterinarian on the screen sliced a sedated dog's stomach open and the insides were carefully pulled out of the open cavity, my mother handed us a glass of water and a glass of tropical punch, respectively. She brushed her hands off on her skirt as she stood and turned to look at the screen. I looked up at her and watched as her face contorted in disgust.

"Why are you watching this?"

"I love animals," Daisuke offered as an explanation, too wrapped up in what was happening on the television screen to give her a more clear answer.

She turned and began walking quickly down the hallway. Daisuke turned to glance at her retreating body over his shoulder and then looked at me.

"Is she okay?"

"Yeah, she's just going to go wash her hands."

He raised an eyebrow. "Wash her hands?"

"Yeah," I said shortly, sipping at my water as the stomach pouch and small intestine were eased back into the dog on the screen.

"Why is she going to wash her hands?"

"I don't know. She just has to."

Daisuke was silent for a while, and I thought he was going to drop the subject. I was just about to sigh in relief when I heard two things almost at the same time: him asking "Why?", and my mother screaming bloody murder. One of them made me drop my glass onto the floor, causing it to shatter into a million broken pieces.

~ ~ ~ ~

"Come on, Ken. You're smarter than that. You know better."

I look from him, sitting in the bathtub with his legs flung over the side, untied shoelaces on his sneakers brushing over the ground, to the toilet, and I feel another shiver dance its way up my spinal cord.

"Ken," he says, exasperated with me, like he usually is, "crickets are not going to crawl up your ass if you sit on that goddamned toilet seat."

I shake my head, backing up away from the thing. I am not going anywhere near it. However, my desperate need for bowel movement is starting to hurt my insides near the lower portion of my body and we only have one bathroom in the entire apartment, which is the one we are in right now.

"Ken, normal kids your age are afraid of the Potty Monster. You, you're scared that crickets are going to crawl up your asshole the second you sit on the toilet seat and start laying eggs inside of your intestines."

I shiver again at the mental picture. I feel my mind playing tricks on me again as little pricks pick at my insides, feeling, disturbingly, exactly the way you'd think a cricket's legs would feel crawling over your skin, rough and scratchy.

"You see a fucking cricket swimming in the toilet bowl water one time, and it traumatizes you forever. They do not live in our sewers and lurk about, waiting for you to sit on the can, so they can crawl through the drainage pipes and into your toilet bowl and up your ass without you knowing it."

"How do you know?" I ask, eyeing him doubtfully, a true skeptic even at such an early age.

"Kenny-boy, I know everything. Genius, remember?" He taps his forehead.

I roll my eyes. My stomach makes an ugly gurgling sound and I can feel my asshole contracting with the need to spill feces. It is quite disgusting.

"Get out," I say suddenly.

His brow furrows, trying to understand what I mean. 

"Get out, get out, get out," I start crying, over and over, frantic as a crackhead who has just caught a whiff of crack when his supply is running too low for comfort.

I yank him by the arms out of the bathtub and shove him out the door. I don't even bother closing it behind him, already pulling my pants and my underwear down to my ankles and falling over myself while trying to get into the bathtub as quickly as possible. I squat down and my forehead is sweating and I'm crying out in mixed pain and delicious relief. Osamu makes a disgusted sound and runs to tell our mother that I'm shitting in the bathtub. 

That night, I get grounded, but I don't need to poop anymore and my stomach has stopped hurting, and my asshole is burning but I know at least I am not at risk of imploding anymore, and the crickets did not get me.

~ ~ ~ ~

After a while, I didn't even know I was being raped. I just stared at that savior of a crack in the ceiling and felt nothing, saw nothing but the crack, heard nothing. 

When he first did it to me, I was actually scared it was going to get stuck inside of me. I was scared he wasn't going to be able to pull out and we were going to have to call Mom and how would we explain it and we'd have to go to the hospital and Osamu was going to have to get his thing cut off, and he would hate me so much if he had to do that, and I worried about all of this so much I hardly even felt how badly it hurt to have a dick rammed inside of me over and over with no preparation or lubrication. 

It was only the morning after that I felt the aftereffects. I couldn't sit down right for a while. My mom thought I had accidentally gotten a bruise or a cut on my ass so when she questioned about my odd behavior, I agreed that that had to be the reason, and she asked to see it and I told her not to worry, that it would probably go away soon enough, and I would check myself later. Osamu just laughed. 

However, after I had been fucked so many times that I reached that numb state every night he decided to take me, and I never felt any physical pain during it anymore, and I never felt anything at all anymore, that was when the mental and the emotional damage started. The physical damage was worn out, and it was time for the trauma and the paranoia to take over. 

One week into being numb every night he came to me I was praying for the physical pain to come back. I wanted to get hurt again. Anything to take away the thoughts keeping me up at night, waiting and wondering if he was going to come to my room that night or not. I kept seeing him during the day, when he was his school and I was at mine. I became wary of strangers, wondering if they wanted to rape me, too. I even became wary of people I already knew. Uncles, aunts, cousins, sometimes even my own parents. Did they want to hurt me, too? Did they all want to hurt me? 

Too much stress is one of the leading causes of insomnia.

I needed physical pain. I needed the hurting back. 

One night, I found a razor, and, remembering something my cousin had told me about cutting herself when she got too sad, I carefully cut a thin red line down the side of my arm.

The pain was welcome.

That night, I slept like a baby.

  
~ ~ ~ ~

"I thought you said you were going to stop."

Smoke wafted up towards the digital sky from the burning ember at the end of the cigarette. It glowed prettily against the black night. 

"Shit, Ken, I forgot. I'm sorry."

He made a move to put it out, but I stopped him. 

"I'll let you finish your last one." 

He smiled at me, eyes bright and rimmed with red. He had not slept lately. I wondered what the cause of his insomnia was. I could not help but feel that somehow it had to be my fault. He shut his eyes and I could not see deep amber anymore. I loved the color of his eyes. I'd never seen anything like it. I didn't like it when he closed his eyes. It was as if his body dimmed a little, and everything became a dull color, like some boring shade of gray. His messy auburn spiky hair was not shining because the sun was not out, but I could still picture the way it shimmered in my mind. It made up for his eyes being closed, though only in the slightest way.

I didn't like smoking, or the people that did it. Their breath smelled bad, their teeth turned yellow, and their kisses tasted nasty. However, his kisses always tasted wonderful to me. I just didn't like the fact that he was abusing his body. I loved his body too much to see it go to waste like that.

"Kill anymore Digimon today?"

"Shut up."

He grinned playfully and snuggled closer to me. I rested an arm around his waist, running my fingers over the exposed skin of his side where his shirt had ridden up. 

"Ryo," I said softly.

"Hmm?"

"I love you too much."

I heard him laugh. "Yeah, sure. Shut up, Ken."

I nuzzled his neck and he put his cigarette out. 

"No more," he said.

"No more," I agreed firmly. 

I moved my head to smell his hair. It didn't smell like his usual lavender shampoo that night. It smelled like rain.

That night was the last time I ever held Ryo close to me.

To this day, I still can't figure out why his hair smelled like rain instead of lavender shampoo.

~ ~ ~ ~

I barely ducked in time to narrowly avoid having a vase smashed into my head. I cursed as I accidentally stepped on a piece of broken glass on the floor. Hopping about on one foot, trying to pull the glass out of my skin, fretting about how messy my apartment was going to be once this was done, I just tried to stay out of the way while my boyfriend flung random furniture - my furniture - around the room.

Crash. Another small potted plant to avoid stepping on. 

"You bastard! How could you? How the fuck could you?! I can't believe you!"

I ducked again. There went my mother's favorite picture of the family. The cracked glass was a spider web of crooked lines all intersecting through one center point. This center point, the middle of the circle of cracks, happened to be directly over my face. I could not tell whether or not I had smiled in the picture when I looked down at it now.

My hesitation lowered my defenses enough to allow a howl to escape my throat as the remote control flew right smack into my skull. I touched my forehead, moaning, glad that it hadn't been anything larger than that.

"Are you trying to kill me?" I asked seriously.

I didn't think he should be freaking out so much. Daisuke didn't even know him. He'd never even met him, yet he was still throwing a tantrum in my living room because he felt sorry for someone he never even knew existed before today.

He stopped throwing things and stood in the middle of the area of damage, hands on his hips, chest heaving with sharp, angry breathing. He was trying to calm down. He was staring around himself at all of the broken shit on the floor. Yes, I thought, your fault. This is all the result of your rage. Try to keep your temper in check next time, okay?

He muttered to himself as he went to a closet and came back with a broom. He began sweeping the glass into small piles. I carefully picked the picture frame up, keeping it face-up so no glass fell, and placed it on the living room table.

He began sweeping broken glass piles towards each other, making larger piles. He went into the kitchen to get the trash can. 

I helped him carefully throw the glass into the trash. We both got our hands cut up. Neither of us cared much. 

"I can't believe you fucking killed him," he said. 

"That was a long time ago," I responded, and suddenly my head felt dizzy and I had to sit down, and when I plopped down on the floor, the spot where my ass decided to plant itself just happened to be one of the glass piles.

I never have had much in the way of good luck.

~ ~ ~ ~

The funeral was a joke. It wasn't even much of a funeral. 

There was no body. There was no known cause of death. 

I knew why. The body was in the Digital World, and the cause of death was my own selfishness. No one knew this but me. 

They didn't have a burial, but they still put up a memorial marker in the graveyard. 

I told them he had wanted to be cremated anyways. He hadn't wanted to be buried in the ground. 

His mother started crying. 

Pretty soon, I started crying, too.

The priest went on talking about what a great kid Ryo Blahblahblah was even though he had never known him. I wondered if he said this at all funerals and just changed the name each time. 

I didn't care too much.

I had already given him the funeral he would have much preferred to have. 

Somewhere towards the middle of the speech his mother grabbed me and hugged me, saying she was so sorry and I must be taking it all so hard, being Ryo's best friend and all. I cried on her shoulder, though mostly because I couldn't believe he had never gotten the chance to tell her we were more than just best friends. I actually felt sorry for her. She would never know that her son was one of those gay people she bad-mouthed with her husband so many nights at the dinner table. I bet she never even noticed how low in his chair he was sunk by the time all of the food was gone from our plates. 

Before my mom drove me home, I stopped in front of the open car door and tilted my head back, sniffing hard at the air. I looked at all of the dark clouds in the sky. 

It smelled like rain.

~ ~ ~ ~

I hate hospitals. They're too white, and too sterile, and they smell too weird. They smell like the stuff you clean the vomit off of the floor with. They feel thick with the air of vanishing lives and decaying humans. The nurses smile too hard, and they speak in too insincere a voice. 

This hospital was different from normal hospitals. The people in this one were sick in a different way. They were sick from their minds, instead of from their bodies. Some were actually sick from both. 

I was all alone in the waiting room. I wanted my mom to come back already. The people around me were giving me odd looks. I got the feeling they recognized me from all of the news segments about me on TV. I squirmed uncomfortably in my chair. 

My mom was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder. She had the clean-freak case. She washed her hands in hot water every hour or so. If she missed one time, she went nuts, started screaming and thrashing about the apartment. She would scare my father shitless when she did that. He finally convinced her to come here, to get better. She took medicine. I didn't know if it helped or not. Sometimes I would still hear her get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. She'd get embarrassed when she was seen in public with her raw, red hands with the burn scars all over them. When people started asking questions, she would find an excuse to slip away and hide. I would tell them to fuck off and mind their own business. My dad would agree with me, but later on he'd tell me to watch my cursing around my mother, because if she heard me use filthy language she'd be disappointed and she'd get sad.

My mother came back into the waiting room and held up her little brown paper bag holding her medicine, shaking it a little, as if saying, "Got it!"

She went up to the front desk and paid for it, and then we got the hell out of there as fast as we could.

~ ~ ~ ~

Nails, scratching down my back and over my arms, long and digging down hard, drawing blood that is apparently a funny sight to him because he starts laughing. Something tickles my ear; it is long and thin and scratchy, and it feels like some kind of antennae. Scratchy feelings all over my body now, not just on my back and my arms and my ears. Slowly, the scratching gets so bad that I can feel it on the inside, scratching away at my tissues, my veins, my blood vessels, my heart, my bones. Scratching, scratching, everywhere. I open my eyes. It's a huge fucking cricket. A huge cricket is raping me. I scream, and the sound comes out like a high-pitched chirping. It answers my call, and I go deaf. I collapse back onto my bed and I don't know anything anymore.

~ ~ ~ ~

Memories are delicate. The human mind is delicate. One tone of voice, one word, one sentence, one name said in the wrong place at the wrong time and to the wrong person, and it could open up a floodgate of bad memories that come launching towards you at breakneck speed and slowly - agonizingly slow - swallow you whole. Memories that can break a person just by being brought to the front of the mind once again. Skeletons dragged up out of the dirt and into the light. Secrets that should have been taken to the grave. Sometimes they are enough to drive a person insane. Sometimes they are enough to drive a person to the breaking point.

You should be very, very careful about what you say to people. You never know what skeletons you could be bringing into the light.

~ ~ ~ ~

"I know you love him."

"Love? I don't love anyone."

"Oh, come on, Ken. Why is it so hard for you to accept that you have deep feelings for him?"

"Because I don't."

"You're just scared of falling in love with him. You're scared to death of him turning on you and hurting you the way you've been hurt in the past."

"The past is the past. I don't build my life today around the things that have happened before. I don't live in constant fear of the fact that I could repeat certain mistakes I've made in the past."

A blatant lie. And she caught it, too.

"That is such a lie. We both know that you do too dwell on the past, and you do it all the time."

"I don't love him."

"Yes you do."

"How could you possibly know how I feel?"

"I just know. I don't know how, I just know."

And so, so badly, more than anything in whole, wide, terrible world, I wanted to believe her. 

~ ~ ~ ~

There is no sound that compares to how much the sound of his heart breaking stirs my soul. He grabs my wrists, yanking on them lightly, head bowed so I can't see his tears, and his soft, heart-wrenching sobs are digging through my skull and ringing in my head. 

"But _why_?" he asks again through his tears. He throws his head back and searches my eyes for truth, and his eyes remind me of a caged animal that knows it is about to be lead to its death because no one ever came to adopt it. "Why, Ken? Just tell me why."

I stare down at him, mouth pressed into a thin line, my face carefully trained into a stoic expression. I don't answer him. That is one question that should never, ever be answered. He must never know why. That is all I know. That is all I can think about right now. 

I gently pull my hands out of his and turn away from him.

"I just can't do it anymore," I say neutrally. "Please leave."

He wipes his eyes, sniffing loudly, and slowly and shakily rises to his feet. I turn around to grab his arm and lead him to the door. Before he knows what's happened, I shut the door behind him, locking it and turning around. I lean back against the door and sigh deeply to myself, reaching a hand up to run through my long, smooth hair. I get the strange sensation of my heart leaping into my throat when something hard bangs against the door I'm leaning back against. I straighten up so my body is not touching it. The banging sounds again. He's pounding his fists against the door. 

I can hear him screaming outside. I wonder if the people who live on the same floor as I do will call and complain. I run to my room, climb up onto the top bunk bed where I have slept since I was a tiny little boy, which I have begun to outgrow a bit so my feet are touching the cold metal rail at the end of the bed as I lie there on my back with my hands over my ears. 

The screaming won't stop. I can still hear it, ten minutes later, and it is driving me nuts. I remove my hands from my ears and intend to march to my front door and scream back at Daisuke for disturbing the others in the apartment, but then I realize he has long since been gone. 

I realize the screaming I hear is actually going on inside of my head.

~ ~ ~ ~

It is warm, gentle, wet, and so wonderfully familiar. In these moments between the slow rising and the peak of ecstasy, I am most aware of how much I love him. His hands caress me, his mouth kisses me, his tongue licks me, and his eyes watch me from his desire-filled half-lidded gaze. I tilt my head back as far as it can go and my eyes roll back in my head. I am riding on a wave of pure, unadulterated pleasure. His fingers slide over my heated skin, and I softly beg for him to move faster. He complies, and we both moan as things move faster and the pleasure builds higher and higher inside of our shared body. My heartbeat is his heartbeat, my inhale releases in his exhale, and I can no longer tell whether he is touching me or I am touching myself. 

He makes a noise in the back of his throat. It sounds like...chirping. 

My eyes snap open. I don't like that noise. I don't like it at all. 

His caresses suddenly feel like scratches. Every path his nails drag through in my body leaves a burning trail that can be felt both on and underneath my skin. I thrash against him, crying out, trying to move away.

He tries to say something, but all I hear is more of that fucking chirping.

I can't take anymore of its scratching. I don't know if I'm scratching myself or if it's only the thing on top of me that is scratching me. When I raise my hands to my face, I can see blood and folded skin underneath my fingernails. I scream and try to move away from it, somehow knowing that it is making me hurt myself, and it is driving me crazy again. 

It won't stop its high-pitched chirping. I fight back. I climb on top of it and scratch and scratch until the blood under my fingernails is running red trails down my fingers and my hands, and it is chirping and screeching itself to death. 

I remember where my knife is, and I feverishly search it out with my bloody hands over the ground. My hand brushes against it and I pick it up and begin stabbing the cricket, driving the blade in as hard as I can, eager to kill the thing that has ruined my life and hurt me so badly in the past. Its screeching is becoming slower and softer now, and it is twitching on the floor, cricket legs pumping as if trying to hop away even though it is on its back. I don't stop stabbing it until it has stopped moving completely.

I breathe heavily and pull the knife out of its body. The knife is dark red. I did not know crickets bled dark red blood. I look down at the cricket, but all I see is the bloody, slashed-up body of my best friend, my lover, Ryo. I stare at him, no longer breathing, and then breathing much too fast to be normal. My eyes fill up with tears. The cricket has not only driven me insane, but it has slain my lover as well. That is when I notice his blood on my hands. I look at him again, and then my hands, back and forth, from him to my hands to my knife. 

I did not kill the cricket after all.

I slowly lower my head onto the floor, my body curled up against itself, hands pressed palm-flat on the floor, fingers twitching and working against the dirt. 

I take a deep breath and my lungs explode and my ears are filled with deafening sound, and it is not chirping or screeching that I hear. It is real, pain-filled, emotional, soul-shattering human screaming. 

~ ~ ~ ~

"Wormmon! Are you almost done making me my tea?" I call from my control room. 

I stare down at my blue-tinted hands where they rest on the keyboard. 

I hear little scuttling sounds clicking on the floor and I turn to look at the small green Digimon holding a tray with a glass cup of tea on it.

"Thanks," I say, lifting it up and taking a sip from it. I make a face. "Try putting less sugar in it next time, Wormmon."

"Yes, master," he replies, bowing his head to me and turning to scuttle out the door to the control room. 

I turn back to my screen of dozens of small squares of activity, watching over the slaves building my control spires. I look over each one, sipping at the overly sweetened tea in a very bored manner as I rest my chin on a gloved palm. 

Something catches my attention on one of the screens.

"What is that?"

I squint and look closer at what looks like a group of human children. I have never, in my entire digital life, seen other humans in the Digiworld. I thought the portals had been closed. 

"What the hell?" My voice is soft and startled, and I grit my teeth at the way these kids managed to surprise me. "Who let them in here?"

I click on the box and it enlarges to take up the entire screen, allowing me to fully look over the people invading my territory. 

My nose scrunches up in disgust as I look them over, but one in particular catches my eye. My face relaxes and then my eyes widen in surprise. My mouth drops open slightly and my glass nearly falls out of my hand. I lean closer to the screen to take a closer look at the boy with the red spikes and the flame jacket. My hand slowly reaches up to touch the boy walking on the screen.

"He looks..."

My breath catches in my throat and I have to remember to exhale. 

"He looks like Ryo."

~ ~ ~ ~

"Ken?"  


"Yes, Dai?"

"Who's Ryo?"

I almost drop the plate I'm rinsing in the sink. I turn to stare at where Daisuke sits at my kitchen table, watching me as I wash dishes. 

"Why do you ask?"

"Well, you sort of called me Ryo last night when we were..."

He blushes lightly. I do, too. He doesn't need to finish that sentence.

"I did?"

"Yeah," Daisuke says a bit sulkily, and with a hint of jealousy as well. "So who is he?"

"An old friend," I say after a brief pause, going back to washing the dishes.

Act natural. Straight face. Stay guarded. Emotionless expression.

"Why would you call me his name?"

"I was thinking about him earlier today. Maybe it was just my subconscious bringing up a memory at the wrong time."

"Uh-huh," he says, in a tone that clearly states he doesn't believe me. "Ken, who is he, for real?"

I finish rinsing the dishes and begin putting them away. "Do we have to talk about this now?"

"When would you prefer we talk about it?" he asks, raising an eyebrow at me.

"I don't know, later?" I try.

Daisuke shakes his head. I sigh. "Let me finish putting these away, and then we can go into my room and talk about it in there, okay?"

Daisuke raises an eyebrow once again. "Okay."

Later on, in my room, Daisuke gawks at me. 

"Your _lover_? Weren't you, like, ten when you knew him?"

"I was ten when I met him. We didn't start going out and stuff until we were eleven and a half. We didn't start sleeping together until we were almost thirteen. Well, he was almost fourteen by then."

"That's still really young."

"Yeah, well, we were both pretty advanced in our thinking," I muttered.

Daisuke nods in understanding. I guess he remembers how "advanced" my thinking was when he first met me as the Kaizer.

"So what happened?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, you're obviously not going out with him, or even friends with him anymore, or else I'd have been introduced to him by now."

"Oh, uh...that's because he...died."

Daisuke's eyes widen. "Oh. Oh, Ken, I'm so sorry. I didn't know."

"It's okay. I've had a lot of time to get over it."

I can still feel the wound in my heart.

"But that's still a lot to deal with at such a young age."

"Yeah. Don't worry about it, though."

"Would you mind telling me how he died?"

There's a sort of long, awkward silence. I hear him swallow saliva. My calm mask is trying its very hardest not to break.

"He..."

You should be very, very careful about what you say to people.

"Um, he..."

You never know what skeletons

"It's...I..."

you could be bringing into the light.

"I killed him."

~ ~ ~ ~

He was crying. He was crying so hard. His fingers curled in the soft, damp fur, forehead pressed against her belly, and I wondered to myself if he was getting cat fur stuck up his nose every time he inhaled. He had only had the cat for one month. He had finally gotten both the owner of the apartment and his mother to allow him to have a pet.

He loved animals. He truly, truly loved them.

"We have to," the vet said softly, resting a hand on top of Dai's head and gently stroking his hair like you would a small child. Only Dai wasn't a child, he was fifteen years old. He was fifteen years old, but he still wasn't old enough to be ready to deal with losing the only pet he'd ever had. 

"She's in pain, honey," Dai's mother said. "All she can think about is how much it hurts just to live, and we can't just give her a medicine that will cure the cancer. We have to let her go."

"No! I won't, I can't, I don't want to. I won't give up on her."

"Dai," I say quietly, staring at the face of the cat, which is contorted in pain, "I think she's already given up on herself."

He sniffles. He looks at where I'm looking, and I guess he can see how much pain she's going through as well as I can, because he crosses his arms and bites his lip and says, softer than any of us have been speaking, "Okay. Go ahead and do it."

The vet gets the needle ready and asks him if he wants to hold her. Dai says he does and he gently takes the fluffy, orange tabby into his arms and he whispers to his cat, "I love you."

Even while the vet is sticking the needle into the cat, even while she's pressing down on it to release the fluid into the cat's veins, even when the cat's heart is stopping and the cat's eyes are hazing over with death, Daisuke still doesn't stop whispering those three words over and over. She goes limp in his arms. He carefully rests two fingers on the cat's forehead and drags them down over her eyes, closing them to the world for the last time. 

I hug him, his mother hugs us both, and the vet pats Daisuke's shoulder, and with his voice quiet and laced with pain, I hear him say, "I don't want to be a veterinarian anymore."

~ ~ ~ ~

I once told Hikari that I don't love Daisuke. I told her that I never did, even once, love Daisuke. 

When I broke up with him, she came to me and she told me that she believed me.

She said that I would definitely have to have never loved him at all to go and break his heart so completely like that. She was mad at me. She was so very angry with me.

I am the biggest liar in the world.

She does not know this. 

Only one person knows this, has ever known this, about me, and that one person is dead, by my own two hands.

She does not understand me.

Only one person has ever truly understood me. This is the same person that knows I am such a talented liar, and that I lie very often, and most of what I say is filled with lies. 

There is one other person, however, that, if he had been given a few day's more time with me, would have come to know that I am the biggest liar in the world, and if given a few more months, would have come to understand me, just as completely and fully as the other understood me when he was alive. 

That one other person, who is still alive, is the one of the two only persons that I have ever loved in my life. 

That one other person will never know this, because I let him go.

I understood what might happen if I didn't. I didn't want him to suffer the way the other one did. I didn't want to cause him any more pain that I had to. 

I didn't want him to turn into another cricket.

He will never know that I saved his life by letting him go. He will never know that letting him go was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life, nor that it is the largest, most complex act of love I have ever done or ever will do for anyone in this lifetime, and perhaps even in the next.

He is probably with someone else by now. I would not know. I have not talked to him in years.

Love is a strange thing. It makes people do the strangest things, and makes people think the strangest things, and it also makes people say the strangest things.

I have but one regret. I never told him that I loved him. I never said the words out loud to him. When I was with him, hands tangled in his red - not auburn - spiky hair, kissing his lips, hands dancing over his dark - not light - skin, I cried it out over and over inside of my head, I love you I love you I love you Daisuke, to compensate for not having the courage to say the words to him out loud. But I wish I had told him. I wish I had told him, because then at least I would not be telling him a lie. I would definitely, unquestionably _not_ be telling him a lie. 

You have really got to be careful what you say - or don't say - to people. You really, really do.

~ ~ ~ ~

__

fin


End file.
